How to Book Horse Racing

Professional Bookmakers tend to avoid taking action on Horse Racing for a variety of reasons. First and foremost is that, while most bookies have a firm handle on sports and casino odds, Horse racing odds and payouts can get a little confusing for the uninitiated. The biggest obstacle is a simple lack of understanding of how it should work and what their profit expectations should be.

Horse racing is an enigmatic affair, often referred to as the sport of kings. Win, Place and Show bets are pretty straight forward. You’re betting if your horse will come in 1st, 2nd or 3rd with payouts increasing proportional to position. But what’s with these Exactas, Trifectas, boxing horses, Superfectas and all these other strange wagers that you hear about people winning thousands off a $2 bet?

Now a-days bookmakers are deferring to the advice of Price Per Head agent services that can customize a horse racing package to your specifications. The first myth that needs to be dispelled is that if you book horses you have to pay track odds. This is false reasoning on the part of the player that causes bookies to shy away from taking horse action. After all you offer the same odds as Vegas when you take a bet on the NFL, why should a Hose Track be any different?

The bottom line is this. Horses are a breed of gambling unto itself. The reason that horse tracks payoff the odds that they do is based entirely on the handle that they take on the race, referred to as the pari-mutuel pool. Winning odds on a horse race are not determined until AFTER the race has been completed and the track knows how much money was bet on each horse and the race as a whole. On an average day at major tracks the pool can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. This action determines the value of payouts so it simply boils down to this. If you’re not getting a cut of the action from the track then why should you be expected to payout winning tickets as if you were? The answer is simple, you shouldn’t.

So where do you go from here?

PPH betting services will put together a horse racing profile that will allow you to take horse action from your players under controlled settings. You can pick and choose from the tracks you want to offer. You can set a max betting limit as high or as low as you want. You can customize the max odds that are paid out on any type of wager and the max winnings. In 98% of wagers your players won’t even be able to tell the difference on payouts unless they’re betting huge underdogs or long shot exotics. In those rare cases that the bet should have paid more you simply tell them if they want to bet horses that way they should do it at the track!